The need to manage and mitigate risks in documents, including changes made to document versions by internal and external sources, has become an essential component of a number of business specialties involved in documents that may be sensitive in nature, such as those found in the legal, financial, government and accounting business sectors. Professionals in industries that consistently engage in document sharing and collaboration within and outside of their organizations find document comparison programs to be essential in ensuring these professionals identify and address all changes made throughout a document's lifecycle and all sensitive metadata held within their documents.
Documents can be edited in a number of programs by multiple users. Changes can be made to text, tables, images, and other embedded objects, values and formulas, header and footer content, comments, and many other document aspects. Even documents that appear to be protected from change, such as PDF documents, are not secure from the possibility of being the recipients of changes or modifications. Users can edit those PDF documents in their native format or convert to a separate file type, edit the document, and then recreate a PDF of that document. A review of a document after it has been shared with an external source, either by humans or by computer programs, is thus necessitated to ensure any changes are accurately identified in the document content.
Document comparison programs, such as Litera Change-Pro, Workshare Professional or Deltaview, Soft Interface DiffDocs, DocsCorp Comparedocs and Esquire Innovations iRedline are computer applications that compare differences between two documents (e.g., Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint Documents, PDF documents, HTML documents, database tables, etc.), a task formerly reserved solely for humans. These programs identify and ascertain differences in an original (first) and modified (second) document and display those differences in a third document, commonly referred to as a ‘redline’ document.
The use of conventional document comparison programs that produce ‘redline’ documents has, to date, been limited in its capacity to incorporate context in review of changes made between original and modified documents in relation to information displayed within tables in Microsoft® Word, Word_Perfect®, HTML, PDF and other document formats. Conventional methods and systems are limited in their ability to comprehend context within table layouts. They are only capable of comparing information presented within tables by comparing information stored at a cellular level. If a change is made to content within a cell, such as merging or splitting cells (both standard table layout processes), that change will be listed as a deletion or addition by the conventional methods and systems. The entire cell (including all content therein) will be displayed by the conventional methods and systems as having been changed. If multiple lines of text exist in the original document in a single cell and this text is moved into multiple cells, the conventional methods and systems would show all the text in the original cell as deleted and all the text in the new cells as an addition.
This presentation of a change to the table cell, even in a scenario where the context of such a change does not affect the user's comprehension of that information, belies the way that users experience and engage with content within tables. The merging of two cells, both containing content, does not change the context of the content originally held within those two, separate cells. Conventional methods and systems, however, consider such a change to a table layout a change to the content itself and mark that content as changed (as a deletion and addition). This limits the user's ability to view a document and decipher which changes made to that document are contextually relevant.